The Executive Who Welcomed Wal-Mart to India

“I like to express myself through large, transformational projects,” said Mr. Mittal, the 49-year-old chairman of Bharti Enterprises, one of India’s most powerful conglomerates.

In August, Mr. Mittal signed a deal to bring Wal-Mart to India as a wholesale operation. Neither party has disclosed the financial details, but if their venture succeeds, it will create India’s first modern wholesale distribution system.

Refrigeration will be essential to that, Mr. Mittal said recently in an interview. “The cold chain — the trucking, the storage — will all ensure that the whole nation gains,” he said. India “can become a food supplier to the rest of the world.”

In spite of such sweeping certainty, or perhaps because of it, Mr. Mittal has become a figurehead of Indian capitalism. He leads the welcome wagon when foreign politicians and business executives visit, and he encourages them to invest. And this week, he headed up a business delegation to the United States, ostensibly to celebrate 60 years of Indian independence, but also to sell India as a destination for foreign business and capital.

Mr. Mittal says his ambitious plans with Wal-Mart are part of his constant search for the “next big fix.”

His first was Bharti Airtel, a company Mr. Mittal founded and built into a national telecommunications firm worth more than $40 billion.

As the son of a politician in Punjab, Mr. Mittal lacked the generations of family money that jump-started the careers of many powerful Indian business executives. (He is not related to Lakshmi N. Mittal, head of the steel giant Arcelor Mittal.) After graduating from Punjab University, Sunil Mittal started a bicycle parts company with a small amount of cash from his father, then delved into various businesses before settling on telecommunications.

Bharti Airtel took off after winning a license for cellular phone service in the New Delhi area in the mid-1990s.

Detractors have suggested that his father’s political connections won Mr. Mittal favors. But Mr. Mittal denies that his father pulled strings, noting that Airtel had just $5 million in profit in 1992, the year his father died. For the year ended last March, profit was 42.6 billion rupees ($1.07 billion).

Large as it is, Bharti Enterprises, like many top companies in India, retains some of the vestiges of the nation’s past. For instance, just 39 percent of Bharti Airtel is publicly traded; 46 percent of the company is owned by Bharti Telecom — which, in turn, is owned by Bharti Enterprises, a privately held group controlled entirely by the Mittal family.

Photo

Sunil Bharti Mittal runs the Bharti conglomerate and promotes the nations private sector.Credit
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Still, critics of Mr. Mittal and his business plans are few, and even fewer are willing to speak on the record. A rare exception was Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the former chief of a rival telecommunications company, who complained in The Times of India this month that Mr. Mittal had taken more credit than he was entitled to for India’s telecommunications revolution.

Neither Wal-Mart nor Bharti Enterprises has revealed financial details of their partnership, Bharti Wal-Mart Private, except to say that each company holds a 50 percent stake.

The reason for Wal-Mart’s interest in India is obvious: the country offers a middle class estimated to be as large as the entire population of the United States and several times the size of China’s middle class.

But turning those hundreds of millions of people into chain store shoppers will not be easy.

Many small retailers, as well as some farmers and politicians, are vehemently opposed to the emergence of chain stores. After protests, Reliance, a local competitor of Bharti, has been forced to close several grocery stores and to lay off workers.

India’s population of 1.1 billion people still shops mainly at small, privately owned stores, like family-run tailors and corner vegetable stands.

Trying to achieve economy of scale, Wal-Mart and Bharti plan to build 10 to 15 wholesale “cash and carry” stores over the next seven years to move items closer to retailers and largely replace the middlemen. The stores will stock groceries, clothing and durable goods.

Wal-Mart is not the only foreign retail company interested in a stake in the Indian market. Wal-Mart swept in when a deal between Bharti and the British retailer Tesco fell apart, Mr. Mittal said.

Wal-Mart officials had met with Bharti executives previously. Aware of a delay in the Tesco talks, the American company stepped in. A month later, Mr. Mittal flew to Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to meet Michael T. Duke, the company’s vice chairman.

“What struck me is they lived the simple life,” Mr. Mittal said. “This is a town that gets to sleep at 8 p.m., and everyone is in the office at 6 in the morning. I’d never seen anything like it.” In contrast, Mr. Mittal lives in one of Delhi’s most opulent houses.

But supporters of Mr. Mittal say that, regardless of the venture’s outcome, his willingness to work with the giant rather than trying to go it alone is a positive sign.

“That he’s decided to team up with Wal-Mart shows he knows he doesn’t know it all,” said Scott R. Bayman, former president of GE India.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Executive Who Welcomed Wal-Mart to India. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe